What does the Ukraine war have to do with the climate crowbar and banker greed? Factually – nothing. But emotionally – everything. The crises and the causes of indignation of this time accumulate in the citizens and add up to a pessimistic feeling. We are caught in a futility trap. At least that’s how it feels.
Nothing goes really well, a lot of things go really wrong – and for me everything is more expensive. Welcome to the Republic of Uncertainty. The politicians in Berlin and Brussels – not just any, but: the green climate prohibition policy – bombard the citizens with a cheerful smile or rude threats with proposals that deeply affect their lives so far.
Without saying how to do it, this new life. Who should pay for it, if that is even possible. And without saying why all this should be necessary in the end. Because not even the big question of meaning has been clarified.
Hope used to be green, but unfortunately that’s over now
Where there should be debate, the apocalypse has long since spread. The apocalypse has an unbeatable advantage for its propagandists: you cannot contradict the end of the world. The end of the world also has a color: it is green. Hope used to be green, but unfortunately that’s over now.
And this is how Katrin Göring-Eckardt explains the climate protection that her party friend Robert Habeck has now launched in a hurry: “I don’t want to live in a country where we have devastation, that people can no longer live there.” Where it gets more than two degrees warmer, ” and the people in the cities also get diseases, can no longer bear it where there is a lack of water…”
The people of Tuvalu may rightly fear that their islands will submerge as a result of climate-related seawater level rise. But does the pensioner in Spandau or the legal assistant in Daglfing have to be afraid of being drowned in the floods or being eaten by new climate viruses?
If he or she doesn’t immediately, and immediately means immediately, put in a new heater, drive an electric car, and replace the tartare with tofu.
Climate protection suddenly sounds so suspiciously like religion
Perhaps it is thanks to people like Göring-Eckardt – or the ever-whining UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – that climate protection suddenly sounds so suspiciously like religion. But in the case of religion, at least there is still hope. While this climate protection in a green robe now has what it takes to develop into a great fear topic.
The unexplained question of meaning goes like this: What use is it if Berlin is climate-neutral in six and a half years, Germany and maybe Europe in 2045, but the biggest climate sinner of this time, China, is currently building more than 200 new coal-fired power plants? And Russia not only lit a barrage of fire over Ukraine, but also abandoned all ecological modernization in its own country? And India, which will soon be the country with the largest population in the world, only wants to be climate-neutral in 47 years?
Anyone who now installs an oil or gas heating system will end up getting really expensive, say the alarmed Green Party climate politicians. Wrong, says common sense. Anyone who is now 65 years old, lives in a 50-year-old house with a heating system that is 15 years old, it can make sense for them to invest in the old technology. Because if it breaks, he’s already dead.
What the climate immediateism has in common with the looming banking crisis
In the end, it should be the same with the cars. Just as there is a fossil heating boom today, the combustion boom will start in eleven years. Unless you can drive from Munich to Mülheim in one go with such an E-Polo and it costs as little as it is really worth thanks to simple technology.
The disappointment generated by an expensive immediate approach to the climate in combination with a barely explained climate strategy is also spreading elsewhere. Sure, the 30 billion Swiss francs that the insatiable bankers of the bankrupt Credit Suisse allowed themselves had nothing to do with the climate and the war at first glance. But only at first glance. Just as German climate actionism stands for a political promise that can hardly be kept, the looming banking crisis is the result of a broken political promise.
Namely that something like the global financial crisis will not be repeated. The Credit Suisse case shows that nobody knows whether the financial market reforms that have been implemented will really work. At the moment even skepticism prevails. What is certain, however, is that the greed of this obviously very special manager caste is unbroken.
The way out of the republic of uncertainty does not lead to deceptive promises
Here the difference between capitalism and market economy can be studied. The latter is rooted in the people, the former only in the capital market. Greed seems to be a human constant. And that’s why you have to at least try to humanize them, which means to rid them of their excesses.
Why is there actually no discussion about a maximum wage? Why should a society that dares to define the minimum wage shy away from setting the maximum? It could be an act of social pacification.
The way out of the republic of uncertainty does not lead via deceptive promises, but via technically clean, well-explained and therefore comprehensible politics – in a respectful service attitude to the customer: the people. Which would already adequately explain Berlin’s largest deficit.
